How to automate the licensing of IDz with a P2 installation

With IDz 15 and 16 we previously posted about using the P2 installation. This method makes rollout a breeze. If you’ve automated it, you might now be wondering about licensing. We also addressed how licensing works for IDz Enterprise Edition and Application Development Framework for z/OS, for which the desktop installer need not worry about.

However, you might have an instance where you are using IBM Developer for z/OS Base edition, and that can be licensed either by floating user, or authorized user licenses. To get your deployment to automatically recognize the floating user license. you will need to create a file called “licensep2.opts”. The format of the file will look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<license>
   <flex enabled="true" readonly="false">
     <server name="license.server.strongback.com" port="27000"/>
   </flex>
   <offeringorder readonly="false">
     <offering
         id="com.ibm.developer.zos.v160"
         version="16.0.0"
         name="IBM Developer for z/OS"/>
   </offeringorder>
   <componentorder readonly="false"/>
</license>

Place this file in the C:\ProgramData\IBM\p2\license directory. You may see one there already. Just overwrite it.

If, however, you have an authorized user license, simply drop that license jar file in the directory listed above. That’s all you need to do. Make sure you put only the jar file, not the zip file that it is packaged in.